HP Total Care Advisor becomes stuck. What should I do?

Question

I recently had to super-sleuth my way through a variety of PC problems until discovering that one of my RAM cards was faulty. I have an HP Pavilion dx6650us Notebook PC (with Duo processors), 32-bit OS, running Vista Home Premium. While restoring my hard drive (before I discovered the hardware problem), I noticed that recently installed updates were not registering with HP Advisor. HP Health Check won't update and shows 3 alerts continually: one of the critical maintenance updates is for Windows driver updates and Vista SP1; another (of medium concern) is a Realtek High Definition Audio Driver; the last notifies me that the phishing filter is turned off. If I use the wrench icon to repair the phishing filter, the notice will go away until the next time I access HP Total Care Advisor.

The audio driver can be re-installed, though part way through installation it notifies me that this file already exists on the PC and asks if I want to overwrite it (yes, I have even over-written it trying to get this resolved). By the way, I was able to successfully install driver updates and Vista SP1 by reading various tech blogs and installing Windows System Readiness Pack Tool KB947821 before installing SP1. I contacted HP support chat online for assistance with SP1 (they didn't seem to know that for only 1 computer I should be installing directly from Windows Update instead of installing the commercial version which is a much larger file). Likewise, when I chatted with HP about the HP Advisor sticking problem they passed me from tech to tech until one advised me to re-install HP Total Care Advisor via a non-HP site. I uninstalled my sticky Advisor and tried, unsuccessfully, to install the new program. I ended up without the Advisor at all, though I still have Windows Update and HP Update. I figure it is a blessing in disguise.

Answer 1

Companies nowadays tend to send you from one tech to another until someone has a different opinion. The problem is that HP Total Advisor is an independent software which works outside the system's functionality. In short words, it;s just an application that gets information from Windows to display alerts and any other updates. To avoid all the complication with tech support, simply use the software package provided on the Drivers Support page for your product and perform a simple re-install. You could also install the application with Run as Administrator. It has proven that this simple method fixes a lot of problems.